only wish and will itself, -- he urged it against the abstract universalism of heaven’s blue, that universal longing without the shadow of an ‘object’ – against the very vault of absolute un-objectivity. Bliss, unconditioned bliss, -- to gain in widest, most unbounded measure the height of bliss, and yet to stay completely wrapt in self: this was the unallayable desire of Christian passion. So reared the sea from out its deepest depth to heaven, so sank it ever back again to its own depths; ever its unmixed self, and therefore ever unappeased, -- like the all-usurping, measureless desire of the heart that ne’er will give itself and dare to be consumed in an external object, but damns itself to everlasting selfish solitude.
{FEUER} Yet in Nature each immensity strives after Measure … . [437W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 113-114]
[438W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 116]
[P. 116] {FEUER} “In the kingdom of Harmony there is … no beginning and no end; just as the objectless and self-devouring fervour of the soul, all ignorant of its source, is nothing but itself, nothing but longing, yearning, tossing, pining – and dying out, i.e., dying without having assuaged itself in any ‘object’; thus dying without death, and therefore everlasting falling back upon itself.” [438W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 116]
[439W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 138-139]
[P. 138] {FEUER} “… Thought, the highest and most conditioned faculty of artistic man, had cut itself adrift from fair warm Life, whose yearning had begotten and sustained it, as from a hemming, fettering bond that clogged its own unbounded freedom: -- so deemed the Christian yearning, and believed that it must break away from physical man, to spread in heaven’s boundless aether to freest waywardness. But this very severance was to teach that thought and this desire how inseparable they were from human nature’s being: how high soever they might soar into the air, they still could do this in the form of bodily man alone. In sooth, they could not take the carcass with them, bound as it was by laws of gravitation; but they managed to abstract a vapoury emanation, which instinctively took on again the form and bearing of the human body. Thus hovered in the air the Poet’s Thought, like a human-outlined cloud that spread its shadow over actual, bodily earth-life, to which it evermore looked down; and into which it needs must long to shed itself, just as from earth alone it sucked its steaming vapours. (…) [P. 139] So should the Poet’s thought once more impregnate Life; no longer spread its idle canopy of cloud twixt Life and Light.
{FEUER} What Poetry perceived from that high seat, was after all but Life: the higher did she raise herself, the more panoramic became her view; but the wider the connection in which she was now enabled to grasp the parts, the livelier arose in her the longing to fathom the depths of this great whole. Thus Poetry turned to Science, to Philosophy. To the struggle for a deeper knowledge of Nature and of Man, we stand indebted for that copious store [Hoard?, i.e. Hort?] of literature whose kernel is the poetic musing (gedankenhaftes Dichten) which speaks to us in Human – and in Natural – History, and in Philosophy. (…) But the deepest and most universal science can, at the last, know nothing else but Life itself; and the substance and the sense of Life are naught but Man and Nature. Science, therefore, can only gain her perfect confirmation in the work of Art; in that work which takes both Man and Nature – in so far as the latter attains her consciousness in Man – and shows them forth directly. Thus the consummation of Knowledge is its redemption into Poetry;
